Outcast Marines Boxed Set

by James David Victor

  “We only just managed to get out. Most of the others…” one of the gray-suited staffers said as he looked up owlishly at her. “There was a hull breach. We didn’t know where from. We tried to isolate the loss of pressure, found that there was a hole in one of the external plates, leading to the internal repair tubes.” The young man coughed.

  “By the time we closed off the nearest room, another hull breach occurred in one of the holds, and then another.” He shook his head, looking at her with wide eyes. “They were in the repair tubes. They managed to break in through the outer hull and crawled around in there like rats until they found another place to breach the inner hull!”

  “The cyborgs,” Jezzy stated as the doors behind her banged open, and the booted feet of more Outcasts could be heard, charging up the stairs to join her.

  “Am I glad to see you,” Jezzy said to the first one to reach her landing, Corporal Karamov. Behind him came Ratko, Willoughby, and Malady.

  “We followed your suit coordinates, got here as soon as we could,” Karamov wheezed, out of breath.

  “They…they don’t die!” the man on the floor said. “I saw them on the internal cameras, and so I sealed the hold they were in and opened the external airlocks, intending to blast them out of there, or at least make them freeze to death…” He shook his head, and Jezzy nodded grimly as he spoke.

  “And they didn’t die. They just kept on coming…”

  “We’re ready to go in, Lieutenant,” Ratko said, loading her automatic shotgun and standing before the airlock, gun leveled at the point it would open.

  “Is there a seal on the other side?” Jezzy asked the three staffers, who nodded. Airlock doors were always designed with an extra empty room on the inner side of them, meant to act as a decompression chamber or a safe ‘bubble’ of air should the main rooms and avenues leading up to them be compromised, like now.

  “Okay, well, you three get off this floor and spread the word.” Jezzy waited for the staffers to hobble and jog down to the floor below, and through the door, before turning to what remained of Gold Squad.

  I wish Sol was here, she thought painfully. Their commander might be a liability in some ways—he was reckless and prone to making spur-of-the-moment decisions that changed the entire mission parameters—but Jezzy was always impressed with just how calm he was under pressure, and how he always put the lives of his squad first.

  And he’s the one who has actually HAD some command training. Jezzy sighed.

  “Weapons caches. Oxygen tanks,” Malady intoned in his flat, emotionless electronica voice.

  “Huh?” Jezzy wondered what he meant, and then realized. “Oh, Malady, you genius.” She had forgotten that, of all of them, he was actually the one who had been a full Marine before becoming a member of the Outcasts and probably had more combat experience than the rest of them put together.

  “Attention all Outcasts!” Jezzy broadcast to her company. “This is First Lieutenant Wen, ready to enter Floor 3 from below. I want you in squad formations. Keep your buddies in sight at all times. You’ve fought these things before, you know what to do—head and spine shots for a kill, nothing else will work,” she said, then proceeded to deliver Malady’s advice.

  “I want non-combat specialists of every Outcast squad to create a weapons caches at major airlock junctures, as well as emergency oxygen breathers for those staffers not in power suits.”

  “Aye, Lieutenant Wen.”

  “Sir! Yes, sir!”

  “Already on it.” She heard the various voices of the other squad leaders in the Outcast Company receive and okay her message as she nodded to herself and turned back to Gold Squad.

  “Okay, you lot,” she said in a lower murmur. “Ready to go do this thing again? Kick butt for the good of the Confederacy?”

  “Always.” Ratko smiled grimly, bracing behind her weapon.

  Then I guess we’d better get this show on the road, Jezzy thought as she switched her communicator back to full-company broadcast.

  “Blood and fire, Marines! Who’s the baddest, meanest, and toughest of all the Marine Corps!? That’s right, it’s us. It’s the Outcasts of Ganymede. Now let’s show these metal suckers they picked the wrong fight!”

  She hit the door-release button and stepped in alongside the remnants of her squad to the small decompression chamber behind, as the airlock to Floor 3 hissed shut behind her, then she hit the decompression button.

  Hssssss!

  It always felt like a sudden gale as the air was sucked out of the chamber, dropping the temperature and the pressure in moments. The gravity vanished, and she felt her feet start to rise from the floor.

  Power Boot Controls: Activate Magnets 20%

  Jezzy’s feet suddenly clanked back into place on the floor of the chamber as the powerful localized magnets that every set of power boots contained were activated. But Jezzy didn’t want it to be difficult to move, so she slid the power being exerted right down to 20%, meaning that she could almost glide and that every step was a bound.

  Behind her, the rest of the squad did the same, setting their own boot magnets to varying degrees of strength, depending on what they preferred to fight in. So at least we’re not entirely weightless, she thought as the light over the inner door ahead of her went from a warning red to a blinking green.

  Release. Jezzy hit the control button, and the inner decompression door slid open to reveal a gloomy world of flickering emergency lights and free-floating equipment.

  And cyborgs…

  16

  General Luna Assistant

  “On my signal,” Tomas the Luna smuggler whispered to his three ‘new employees’: the Imprimatur of Proxima, the Ambassador of Earth, and the Squad Commander from the Outcasts.

  Only currently, they did not look like their rightful jobs. Instead, they all wore the shabby gray and tan encounter suits of Luna workers, and they were waiting to join the crush of similarly-clad workers hurrying up the ramp to Loading Door 2 of Port 13.

  “And you’re sure that this ship of yours is going to make it?” the ambassador muttered darkly at their guide. They had left Max Poulanous just a little while earlier, with great sadness on both parts as he returned to his bistro and his boy.

  “Just try to remember us—all the little people under your Confederacy and Marine Corps…” had been Max’s final words to Lieutenant Cready before they solemnly shook hands.

  I will never forget, Solomon had promised, and he knew that it was true. It was these ‘little people,’ as Max had called himself, that suffered the worst, Solomon had realized. The staffers on Ganymede, the citizens of Proxa, and even the Martians in Armstrong Habitat.

  It doesn’t matter if they’re colonists or Confederates, Solomon agreed silently. We’re all facing an enemy that is far worse than anything we can do to each other.

  “This ship of mine will make it, lady,” Tomas growled back. “And you know why? Because I can smuggle anything.”

  “You sound pretty certain,” the ambassador said. But Solomon realized that he admired Tomas, despite all his outrageous arrogance in taking Solomon’s power armor! You needed self-belief for this job. The job that was only a few nudges away from what Solomon had used to do, after all.

  “The Helga is a transport ship that is scheduled to go and pick up the latest in Martian iron,” Tomas explained once again. “Where it gets brought back here, and then off to all of its buyers who’ve already invested in it,” he said.

  Minus a nice cut to you, the smuggler king of Luna, no doubt, Solomon thought.

  “But I thought you said that ‘Commander-in-Chief’ Hausman—” Imprimatur Mariad Rhossily said his name with apparent humor, as if she found the title ridiculous. “—had stopped all traffic to and from Earth?”

  “He has,” Tomas growled, clearly annoyed. Solomon wondered what that would mean for his operation in the near future. “The Helga is one of the last boats to get clearance, and that is only because there are a lot of very rich corporat
ions both here on the Moon and back on Earth who want their imports.”

  “But Hausman has declared the Rapid Response Fleet to be traitors?” Ambassador Ochrie stepped in. “How is the Helga supposed to make their transaction with Mars, which is currently under Asquew’s command?”

  “Ah, ye of little faith…” Tomas gave the woman a crooked grin. “The iron has already been brought and loaded onto a Martian cargo ship, which has already jumped from Martian space…before New York,” he said meaningfully. “I have a friend in Hausman’s guard—”

  You do? Solomon thought.

  “—who said that this was the last shipment that was going to come out of Mars for a long time. And Hausman needs to keep his corporate backers happy, right?”

  “Corporate backers like Taranis?” Solomon raised an eyebrow. Was he about to help—albeit in a tiny way—Taranis to build more killer cyborgs?

  “I have no idea.” Tomas shrugged. “So, the Martian jump-ship isn’t coming here because of the trade embargo, but it’s going to be arriving near the inner asteroid belt, where the goods will transfer to the Helga, and where you three get on the Martian ship and fly off to your beloved Asquew.” Tomas smiled proudly.

  That’s the plan, Solomon knew. It was a complicated plan as far as he was concerned. His old criminal instincts shouted a warning at him that there was already too much that could go wrong. Too many people were involved—from Tomas and his band of smugglers, to the other staffers and whomever the pilot and captain of the Helga was, and finally to this other Martian cargo ship. Would they all be loyal to Asquew? Would any of them? How closely was the new ‘commander-in-chief’ paying attention to this final ship to break the embargo?

  Solomon had never liked complicated plans, in all of his years of running some of the biggest scams, heists, and cons in the history of New Kowloon.

  A complicated plan always breaks, he told himself. Keep it simple. The best jobs were always the ones where it was just him, his wits, and one destination. The fewer people involved, the better.

  Only now I have the Imprimatur of Proxima and the Ambassador of Earth to worry about, Solomon thought irritably. Both would be worth a fortune to Hausman, and either would probably be worth a lot to any number of rival factions, from the First Martian seditionists to the mysterious Taranis Industries.

  And I’m the only person they’ve got, this side of Mars. Solomon took a deep breath. He had never thought that this is what his life would become. Protecting people. Saving lives. Loyal to the Confederacy. No, not the Confederacy! he corrected himself immediately. Loyal to the soldiers who had fought alongside him, had died for him. Loyal to the Outcasts.

  And the Outcasts were somewhere out there, fighting in the darks between the stars, and he was stuck here. But he had been given a mission by his superior officer, Solomon argued with himself. A mission that he had failed at but had been given to him because Asquew had believed in him. Had trusted him.

  And so, if it is the very least that I can do, I will get the pair of you to safety, Solomon silently promised the two women at his side.

  “Let’s do this.” Solomon nodded to Tomas.

  “Go!” Tomas pushed Solomon’s back, and he moved quickly across the open ramp to where the latest cart of metal boxes had been brought up and was awaiting workers to push and pull it the rest of the way through Loading Door 2 to the waiting Helga beyond.

  Solomon was the first to arrive at the cart, moving to the front to grab one of the metal handles as Ochrie and Rhossily moved to the back, reaching up to push it. “Got it?” Solomon whispered to the two women, who nodded at him seriously from the shadows of their cowls.

  “Let’s go.” He heaved, hauling the cart that was supposedly full of machine repair parts and spare components for the Helga up the ramp, bouncing over the airlock seals and into the noisy, busy hold of the docked ship.

  The Helga was a standard-sized transporter ship, which meant that it had a series of three large holds but with only one door at each end. Each hold looked like a warehouse with a gantry level running around the top with doors up into the mess halls, cabins, and whatever other amenities the Helga afforded its staff.

  “Where are we going?” the ambassador hissed at Solomon as he pulled the cart past a line of jogging staffers, and then past wide, empty bays waiting for the shipment of Martian iron.

  Solomon scanned his surroundings. There was the large opening to the central hold, Hold 2, and beyond that, Hold 3, but there was also a whole range of smaller bays with carts just like this one lined up under the gantries.

  “There,” he said. It was darker down there, and it seemed to be a place for general maintenance equipment. And all we have to do is to pretend we’re busy for the next hour or two, Solomon thought, and then make it across to the Martian transporter at the other end.

  If it was a longer jump that they were about to take part in, then Solomon might have been more worried. He might have tried to find them a safer place to buckle up and wait out the nausea and dizziness of Jump Sickness, or he might have been more worried of their true identities being uncovered by the Helga’s staff.

  But this is only a micro-jump, Solomon told himself. All we have to do is keep our head down for an hour, hide out somewhere dark.

  Currently, they each had on the encounter suits of ‘Luna General Assistants,’ which was a very uninteresting way of saying that they were pretending to be any one of the short-term contract staff who worked the transport network. It was Tomas who had gotten them their suits and told them that no one would bat an eye. He had already ordered three of his guys off the work detail to be replaced by these three.

  What if they want to check identity cards? Solomon thought.

  Tomas had said they wouldn’t, and Tomas was their only shot at getting to Mars.

  “Hey! You three! Stop, you three!” a voice suddenly barked down at them from above, and Solomon froze.

  What if the Helga staff know all of Tomas’s workers? What if they’re suspicious?

  “Sir?” Solomon said in a thick voice, looking up at the thin man on the gantry above them in similar shabby worker suit grays, a data-screen in his hands. He was obviously some kind of supervisor for the Helga.

  “You Luna lot are new, ain’t ya?” the man shouted down over the hiss and gasp of pistons and the bustle of other staffers hurrying here and there.

  Solomon’s fist clenched on the handlebar of the cart. Frack.

  “Is it that obvious, sir?” he managed to say.

  The supervisor paused, looking hard at Solomon for a second, before snorting in disgust. “Less of your lip, son. Those parts are going for Hold 3. Right at the back in the engineering section, you got that? You can follow simple instructions, can’t you?”

  Breathe. Solomon felt his chest start to fill with anger as his temper rose. Follow simple instruction, he thought. I’ve been ordering men and women to their deaths! And before that, I masterminded one of the biggest heists against the Asia-Pacific Partnership Yakuza there has ever been!

  But, unlike the Solomon he had been—the one who would tell the overseer just what he could do with his ‘simple instruction’—the newer Lieutenant Solomon took a deep breath and brought himself under control.

  I have a mission and a duty. To these two women at my side. To Asquew. To the honor of my Outcast brothers and sisters.

  “Yes, sir. I can follow simple instructions, sir.” He nodded and proceeded to haul the cart away from the safe, dark place he had been meaning to stash both it and their party, and instead rumbled it over the airlock seal to Hold 2 as the imprimatur and the ambassador pushed at the other end.

  “That was too close,” the ambassador whispered as they trundled through the exact same warehouse layout as before, but the crowds of other staffers were growing thin, Solomon was glad to see.

  Departure imminent! Please ensure your cargo is stowed and your duties completed to ensure a speedy departure.

  The ship’s alert system annou
nced this as there was a hiss from Hold 1’s doors as the airlock seal started to slide shut.

  “Lieutenant!” the ambassador hissed at him again.

  “Trust me, just wait…” Solomon was dawdling, pausing the cart by a stand of small forklift loaders and bending down as if he were adjusting one of the thing’s wheels. They were mostly out of sight of Hold 1 and the supervisor, Solomon reckoned. All we have to do is act natural.

  The ship’s alert system sounded again, now to be joined by a low, warning beep that signaled their liftoff.

  “C’mon.” Solomon stood up, rattling the cargo crate into Hold 3, which had lost the brilliance of the service lights and instead just had the dull glow of the ship’s background lighting.

  Hold 3 was deserted, but it wasn’t empty, Solomon saw.

  Departure imminent! Please ensure…

  Half of Hold 3 was already given over to large crates of ruggedized plastic, each one several feet long and a few feet tall.

  Where have I seen something like that before? Solomon wondered as he slid their cart next to the others, locked the wheels, and tied the webbing around it.

  Hsssss! The outer doors had finally closed, and now the doors between the holds were also beginning to hiss shut, too.

  “Solomon!” the ambassador squeaked in alarm.

  “It’s alright, Ochrie. This is the plan,” Solomon insisted, drawing them closer into the shadows of the crates. “The boat’s busy. We’ll just be forgotten about in here, and then in an hour, forty minutes, whatever, we’ll sneak out and onto the Martian transporter.”

  That was Solomon’s plan, anyway. As it turned out, Tomas’s was far more successful than his.

  “Hey! What in the name of Earth are you three still doing down here?” shouted a voice from above them. It was the supervisor, having entered their gantry level by some hidden door above, obviously inspecting the holds before final takeoff.

  Departure imminent! Please ensure…

  “Get up here and get to the jump-seats now!” the supervisor snapped, waiting until Solomon, the ambassador, and the imprimatur hurried up the stairs to the gantry level, where he directed them through the nearest bulkhead door.